Axiom Verge is coming to PlayStation Vita on April 19th

The game’s developer Tom Happ revealed that the game’s long-awaited Vita release date will be April 19th, more than a year after the game launched on PlayStation 4 in March 2015. Those who have purchased the game on Playstation 4 will be able to download the Vita version for free.

“I’d like to give a little bit of context on what took so long,” Happ wrote on the PlayStation Blog. “When I started development of Axiom Verge, I was using a development framework called XNA. Support for XNA was abandoned, so the community created an open source version of XNA called MonoGame. Sony told me they were working to get MonoGame supported on both PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. I knew that Axiom Verge would be great on a handheld, so I jumped at the opportunity.”

“After the PlayStation 4 version was done, however, porting it to Vita turned out to be a lot more challenging. Optimizing an engine is slow and painstaking work,” Happ continued. “One analogy that I like to use when describing getting Axiom Verge working on PS Vita is that of a lightbulb. For months, Tom Spilman was putting in all of the wiring, but until it was fully connected, the light bulb just couldn’t turn on. And finally, about a month ago, Tom Spilman was able to make the final connection. The build went from not running at all on Vita to running almost perfectly. There were a few bugs here and there that needed to be tweaked, but most of that was fairly minor and easily handled.”